News Roundup: LinkedIn Mentions, Etc.

New feature: LinkedIn mentions

If you’ve browsed through the Altmetric Explorer lately, you might have noticed a new addition: the LinkedIn tab (see below for a screenshot). We’ve been collecting mentions of scholarly articles on LinkedIn for a while, and now all these data are part of the Altmetric score. Take the LinkedIn tab for a spin on this example article details page.

Although counts from Twitter and Facebook still make up the bulk of mentions of papers online, the professional social media network LinkedIn is also being used by academics to discuss articles. So far, we’ve tracked 3200 posts on LinkedIn about 1603 unique papers. The graph below shows the average number of LinkedIn mentions seen by Altmetric n days after the publication of a paper (where n = 0, 1, … 365 days). To construct the graph, we used LinkedIn mentions data associated with a sample of papers published after 1 January 2012 (n = 609). The graph shows us that most of the attention occurred within the first week following a paper’s publication. Nevertheless, a low level of activity persisted over the course of a year after publication.

We’re on LinkedIn as well, so be sure to connect with us there.

Digging into altmetrics

Tuija Sonkkila, data curator at the Aalto University Library (Finland), recently looked at the online attention surrounding Aalto University’s research output (from 2007 to the present) using the rAltmetric package for R. She wrote up her observations in a great blog post called “Digging into altmetrics”.

Scholarly metrics get ‘TechCrunched’

In other cool news, we’ve been mentioned in this TechCrunch article by Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu. In his article, Price argues that new “reputation metrics” will encourage scientists to make their research freely available, and lists Altmetric as one of the startups that will help “speed up science”.